List Hygiene
List hygiene is the practice of regularly cleaning your email list by removing invalid, inactive, or unengaged subscribers to maintain list quality and deliverability.
What Is List Hygiene?
List hygiene involves several activities: removing hard-bounced addresses immediately, suppressing addresses that consistently soft-bounce, unsubscribing or suppressing subscribers who haven't engaged in a defined period (usually 90-180 days), removing duplicate addresses, and correcting obvious typos. Regular list cleaning improves every email metric — when you stop sending to people who never engage, your open rates, click rates, and overall engagement scores all increase. List hygiene also directly protects your sender reputation, since ISPs factor in engagement rates when deciding whether to deliver your emails to the inbox.
Why It Matters for Newsletters
A dirty list is an expensive list. You're paying to send emails to addresses that will never generate value, and worse, those dead addresses are actively hurting your deliverability. Regular list hygiene is the equivalent of weeding a garden — it creates space for your healthy subscribers to thrive.
Best Practices
- Run a re-engagement campaign before removing inactive subscribers — give them a chance
- Remove hard bounces immediately after every send
- Review and suppress consistently inactive subscribers every 90 days
- Use email verification tools to validate addresses before importing them
- Document your hygiene process so it happens consistently
How Aldus Handles This
Aldus automates list hygiene: hard bounces are removed instantly, soft bounces are tracked and suppressed after repeated failures, and the re-engagement campaign feature identifies and attempts to win back inactive subscribers before removal.